Google's Android operating system, meanwhile, despite
having many technological advantages over Apple's iOS, is still harder and more complicated to
use that Apple's offering.

The common thread of these anecdotes is that Google designs its
products for geeky technologists, while Apple designs for normal humans.

And it turns out that geeky technologists are a small, weird
niche of the broader consumer market, which is making it harder
for Google to become a beloved mass-market brand.

The difference between Google's product design and Apple's
product design starts with the difference between the types of
people each company places the highest value on.

Google has an engineering culture, in which brilliant
technologists are the rock stars.

The brilliant
student.Photo by Chris Hondros/Getty
Images

Apple, meanwhile, has a product-design and marketing culture, in
which "technology" merely serves to support a product's function
and form.

More specifically, Google, which is led by founders and
executives who posted amazing grades at the country's top
universities, is legendary for hiring only the smartest people it
can find--with Google's definition of "smart" being based on the
applicant's GPA at a top university and the applicant's ability
to handle
interview questions that would flummox the vast majority of human
beings.

Apple, meanwhile, was founded and built by a college drop-out who
credited LSD and calligraphy with inspiring more of his
product-design genius than anything he ever learned in school.

Like most people who work at Google, Steve Jobs was brilliant, but he likely never
would have been able to get hired at Google. The Google
hiring algorithm would have taken one look at his flaky
educational background and concluded that he would never have
amounted to anything.

Steve Jobs's genius, in other words, was a sort of genius that
Google places little or no value on.

But if Google is to become a beloved mass-market brand, it's also
the sort of genius that Google needs a lot more of. And the place
to find that genius is probably not the country's most
prestigious computer engineering programs.

BI's Matt Lynley recently posted a series of charts from LinkedIn that show the different emphases
Google and Apple use when making their hiring and staffing
decisions.

Both Apple and Google have their pick of students from any
universities in the country.

And nowhere is the difference between the two companies more
visible than in the schools they choose to recruit from.

I'm going to guess that Google does not employ all that many
people who went to San Jose State. And I'm going to further guess
that Google does not employ them because Google does not consider
them smart enough or accomplished enough to work at Google.

But it seems safe to say that most mass-market consumers--the
folks Google hopes will one day love its products as much as they
love Apple products--are less like people who went to MIT
(Googlers) than they are like people who went to San Jose State.

So I'm going to suggest, respectfully, that if Google wants to
design products that are as beloved by normal people as Apple's
products are, it might want to hire a college dropout or two. Or
at least a few more folks who went to universities like San Jose
State.